The theoretical backbone of the work is the Social Identity Approach, a long-standing framework in social psychology which holds that people can perceive themselves at different levels: as unique individuals or as members of a group. Which level is salient at any moment changes how information from the environment is processed. A player who identifies strongly with the team treats what benefits the group as benefiting the self, and prior research has repeatedly linked higher social identity to more pleasant affective states in athletes. Because emotions in sport are deeply tied to these self-categorisation processes, the authors argue that coaching staff need tools to help athletes manage identity-driven emotional fluctuations — and that virtual reality, with its capacity to recreate emotionally charged game contexts on demand, is an ideal laboratory for doing so.

Recreating one of rugby’s most emotionally loaded moments was the team’s central design challenge. They chose the try. Forty male professional and aspiring professional players from three French clubs, with an average age of about 21, were fitted with an HTC Vive Pro head-mounted display and five body trackers — one on each hand, one on each foot and one below the navel — so that their real movements drove their virtual body in real time. The virtual environment, built in Unity3D, reproduced the Stade de France, complete with a giant screen, customised club colours and flags, and a crowd whose chants and songs were mixed from real recordings, including footage captured at a 2021 Autumn Nations Series match in Bordeaux. The congratulatory voices of the virtual teammates were recorded by researchers using a script written with an actual rugby player, so that the shouts echoing across the pitch matched what players genuinely say after a score.

Before anything happened, each participant went through an embodiment phase. Standing alone on an empty virtual pitch, they watched their avatar — a generic rugby player model whose skin colour had been matched to their own — reflected in a virtual mirror while moving their arms and legs. This visuo-motor synchrony is a well-established trigger for the body ownership illusion, the sensation that a virtual body is one’s own, which arises from the brain’s multisensory integration of visual and motor signals. Previous work shows that once people experience ownership over an avatar, they accept it as a partial representation of themselves even when it does not resemble them. Only after this foundation was laid did the experiment proper begin: participants were told they had just scored, and the two-minute try scene unfolded around them.

The experiment used a within-subjects design, so every player experienced both conditions. In the collective condition, the stadium announcer declared that the player’s team had scored, supporters held signs reading “GO” followed by the team’s name, a replay of the try played on the giant screen beneath the club logo, and virtual teammates sprinted in to celebrate before forming a huddle at centre field while the captain delivered a motivational speech. In the individual condition, the announcer named the player personally, supporters waved signs with his own name, his photo replaced the team logo on the big screen, and his teammates — dressed in neutral colours — ignored him entirely. The question was whether these carefully engineered social cues could steer the players’ sense of self in opposite directions.

Measuring the answer without destroying the illusion required a genuine technical innovation. Traditionally, presence and embodiment are assessed with questionnaires filled in after immersion, forcing participants to reconstruct fading memories. Asking questions mid-immersion, meanwhile, risks shattering presence the moment a floating questionnaire appears. The team’s solution was the “transparent bubble”: when a measurement was needed, the surrounding environment darkened, ambient sounds were toned down and the depth of field shifted, giving players the impression of being inside a soap bubble. A two-metre-long visual analogue scale, or a 9-by-9 affect grid adapted from Russell’s classic measure, materialised sixty centimetres in front of them at chest height, and they moved a yellow cursor with their virtual hand. Identity was probed with three instruments: a scalar scale for social identity (“I feel like a member of my team”), a scalar scale for personal identity, and a bipolar scale forcing a trade-off between the two.

The results were strikingly one-sided. In the collective condition, social identity rose by roughly 14 percent, from a mean of 73.1 to 83.1 on the 0-to-100 scale, while personal identity fell by nearly 30 percent, from 45.3 to 31.9. The bipolar identity scale swung toward the group by about 24 percent. Affective valence climbed from 77.3 to 87.5 and arousal from 64.6 to 79.5, both statistically significant. In the individual condition, by contrast, none of these variables changed significantly — personal identity did not rise, arousal did not budge, and pleasant affect stayed flat. Linear mixed-effects models confirmed that neither rugby expertise nor prior VR experience explained these shifts, ruling out the possibility that only VR-savvy or less elite players were susceptible.

The immersion metrics added an unexpected twist. Place illusion — the sensation of genuinely being on the pitch — increased significantly in the collective condition, from 69.8 to 80.3, and co-presence, the feeling of sharing the field with one’s teammates, was far higher there (a mean of 80.3) than in the individual condition (59.3). The authors interpret this through the lens of predictive processing: the virtual teammates behaved exactly as real teammates would, matching the players’ learned expectations of post-try rituals, and the synchronised human voices seemed to confirm that the space was genuinely shared with other agents. Intriguingly, professional players reported lower body ownership and place illusion than aspiring professionals, which the authors suggest may reflect experts’ heightened body awareness and sharper sensitivity to discrepancies between the simulation and the real stadiums they know intimately.

Perhaps the most conceptually important finding concerns how the two identity levels relate. In the collective condition they moved in opposite directions, consistent with classical self-categorisation theory, yet across conditions they behaved largely independently — social identity remained high even when the scene was engineered to spotlight the individual. The authors conclude that it is changes in social identity, not personal identity, that primarily drive athletes’ psychological experience in team sports, and that the failure of the individual condition suggests “being alone” is simply the absence of social cues rather than their symmetrical opposite. The study’s identity measures, while grounded in the literature, have not yet undergone full psychometric validation, and the authors call for physiological measures such as heart rate and electrodermal activity, gaze tracking, and cybersickness controls in future work.

Even with those caveats, the implications reach well beyond rugby. The transparent bubble technique offers social scientists a way to collect in-the-moment subjective data without ejecting participants from the very experience being measured — a meaningful advance for VR methodology across psychology. For practitioners, the study sketches a realistic path toward mental training programmes in which coaches and sport psychologists can dial specific identity cues up or down, recreating the emotional texture of a roaring stadium on a Tuesday afternoon. If emotions in team sport flow through identity, this experiment shows the tap can now, at least in part, be turned by design.

Subject of Research: Inducing and measuring social and personal identity in professional rugby players using immersive virtual reality

Article Title: Inducing and measuring identity levels in professional rugby players during immersion in an interactive virtual environment

Article References: Neyret, S., Pellet, J., Ryard, J., Campo, M., & Chardonnet, J.-R. (2026). Inducing and measuring identity levels in professional rugby players during immersion in an interactive virtual environment. PLOS One, 21(10), e0359964. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0359964

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0359964

Keywords: virtual reality, social identity, rugby, sport psychology, embodiment, presence, co-presence, affect, body ownership illusion, mental training, team sports, visual analogue scales

The research team, led by Robin Kamrla and Konrad Schöniger of Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg, analyzed structural MRI scans and questionnaire data from 261 healthy adults aged 18 to 64. Participants completed the German version of the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, a 14-item questionnaire that yields separate scores for presence and acceptance, alongside clinical interviews and standardized measures of depression and anxiety. All participants were free of current psychiatric diagnoses and psychotropic medication, allowing the researchers to examine how everyday differences in trait mindfulness map onto brain structure in a non-clinical population.

What set this study apart was its analytical strategy. Rather than correlating each mindfulness subscale with brain structure separately — the approach taken by most previous work — the team built a single multiple regression model that included both subscales simultaneously and then explicitly tested for regions where the two moved in opposite directions. This differential dissociation approach directly asks whether a brain region grows with one component while shrinking with the other, a pattern that would be invisible, or even misleadingly averaged away, in conventional univariate analyses. Grey matter volume was estimated with voxel-based morphometry using high-resolution T1-weighted images acquired on a 3 Tesla scanner, and results were corrected for multiple comparisons using non-parametric threshold-free cluster enhancement with 5,000 permutations.

The results revealed a striking split. Acceptance, measured by items such as being friendly to oneself when things go wrong, correlated positively with grey matter volume in the left rolandic operculum and the left postcentral gyrus — regions that make up the primary and secondary somatosensory cortex, the brain’s machinery for perceiving bodily and sensory signals. Presence, by contrast, was negatively associated with grey matter in those same cortical areas. In other words, the more a participant scored on acceptance relative to presence, the larger the volume of their somatosensory regions; the more they scored on presence relative to acceptance, the smaller those volumes appeared.

The second direction of dissociation produced an equally compelling finding, this time in the limbic system. Within a targeted region-of-interest analysis of the amygdala, the almond-shaped structure central to emotion perception and threat processing, grey matter volume in the right hemisphere was negatively correlated with acceptance and positively correlated with presence. Higher presence paired with lower acceptance was associated with a larger amygdala, while higher acceptance with lower presence accompanied a smaller one. This pattern echoes the Monitor and Acceptance Theory of mindfulness proposed by Lindsay and Creswell in 2017, which holds that monitoring — the presence-like component — can intensify all experiences, negative, positive, and neutral alike, whereas acceptance dampens affective reactivity and counterbalances that amplification.

The psychometric data reinforced the neural story. Acceptance scores correlated strongly and negatively with both depression and anxiety symptoms, and these relationships held even after statistically controlling for presence. Presence, meanwhile, showed correlations with depression and anxiety that vanished entirely once acceptance was taken into account. This mirrors the earlier work of Kohls and colleagues, who found that only acceptance, not presence, was linked to reduced anxiety and depression — the very conditions for which mindfulness-based interventions appear most effective. The new study extends that dissociation from questionnaires to brain anatomy, suggesting that the clinical benefits of mindfulness may flow primarily through acceptance-related neural circuits.

Post-hoc analyses sharpened the picture further. When each subscale was examined separately while controlling for the other, acceptance was associated with grey matter in the bilateral rolandic operculum, bilateral postcentral gyrus, supplementary motor area, cingulate cortex, and precuneus, as well as limbic structures including the right amygdala, parahippocampal gyrus, and superior temporal pole. Presence, in its unique variance, was linked to negative associations in somatosensory and auditory regions such as Heschl’s gyrus. The researchers interpret this as evidence that acceptance is tied to the deep, non-judgmental processing of bodily sensations and emotions, whereas presence reflects the capacity for intentional shifts of attention — a refocusing skill that, on its own, does not engage the emotion-integration circuitry.

The authors are careful about what these structural correlations can and cannot mean. Grey matter volume is an indirect marker, mediated by factors such as neural efficiency and plasticity, and the study’s cross-sectional design cannot determine whether brain shape shapes mindfulness or mindfulness practice reshapes the brain. The sample was also predominantly young and healthy, limiting generalizability to clinical populations, and individual meditation experience was not assessed. The researchers themselves note that the study was not preregistered and that their post-hoc analyses captured only the variance unique to each subscale, not the substantial portion the two share — the subscales correlated at r = 0.56 in this sample.

Even with those caveats, the implications are considerable. If mindfulness is treated as a single unified construct, interventions may inadvertently train the wrong component for the wrong goal. Someone high in presence but low in acceptance might, according to the Monitor and Acceptance Theory, experience heightened affective reactivity — attending intensely to everything without the emotional integration that acceptance provides. The new neurostructural findings give that theoretical framework an anatomical footing: presence was associated only with neocortical regions, while acceptance reached into the limbic system in the opposite polarity. The two subdomains, the authors argue, may function as complementary and partially compensatory mechanisms within the broader mindfulness construct.

Future work, the team suggests, should test whether the same dissociation appears in functional MRI responses to emotional stimuli, and whether longitudinal or intervention-based designs can establish causal relationships between meditation practice, acceptance, and limbic structure. The differential analysis framework itself may prove portable, offering a template for teasing apart compensatory mechanisms in other psychological constructs that have been lumped together under single labels. For now, the message for both scientists and practitioners is clear: the mindful brain is not one thing. Being fully present and being fully accepting recruit different, and in places opposing, neural signatures — and understanding that duality may be the key to explaining why mindfulness helps some minds and, occasionally, intensifies the experience of others.

Subject of Research: Neurostructural correlates of the presence and acceptance subdomains of trait mindfulness in healthy adults

Article Title: Neural Correlates of Dissociating Mindfulness Subdomains: A Differential Analysis Approach

Article References: Kamrla, R., Schöniger, K., König, P., Zwiky, E., Küttner, A., Scheiwe, G. S., Andreev, J., Fleischer, L., Uhlig, M., Ptasczynski, L. E., Spitzer, M., Deistung, A., Wohlgemuth, W. A., Selle, J., & Redlich, R. (2026). Neural Correlates of Dissociating Mindfulness Subdomains: A Differential Analysis Approach. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-02993-6

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-02993-6

Keywords: mindfulness, presence, acceptance, grey matter volume, amygdala, voxel-based morphometry, Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory, Monitor and Acceptance Theory, somatosensory cortex, emotion regulation, structural MRI, trait mindfulness

At the heart of the framework lies a three-level distinction that challenges how VR research is often reported. Technological immersion refers to objectively describable properties of a media system, such as representational fidelity, interactivity, sensorimotor contingency, and the range of sensory channels addressed. Subjective immersive experience, by contrast, describes the temporally variable ways learners perceive and interpret their interaction with a virtual environment, including presence, engagement, embodiment, and perceived agency. Immersive learning, the third level, denotes a pedagogically designed process in which a potentially immersive activity is connected with prior experiences, preparation, situated tasks, educator guidance, and subsequent reflection and transfer. Confusing these levels, the paper argues, leads to the widespread but unjustified assumption that wearing a headset automatically produces presence, engagement, or understanding.

The theoretical backbone of the model draws on John Dewey’s pragmatist conception of experience, particularly his principles of continuity and interaction. Continuity means that every experience draws on preceding experiences and shapes how later ones are interpreted. Interaction refers to the relationship between a learner’s existing dispositions and the objective conditions of a situation. Under this view, learners never enter a virtual environment as neutral recipients of stimuli; they arrive with prior knowledge, expectations, values, emotions, media experience, and culturally shaped interpretive frameworks. The same virtual scenario may become a challenging learning opportunity for one student, confirm an existing belief for another, or remain confusing or irrelevant for a third. Dewey’s warning that not every experience is educative, and that some may even restrict future learning, sits uncomfortably beside the enthusiasm that often surrounds educational VR.

The I-MEIL organizes VR-supported learning into three interrelated phases: prior and preparatory experience, situated immersive experience, and reflective and transfer-oriented experience. The first phase encompasses learners’ biographical and educational backgrounds alongside instructional preparation, such as activating prior knowledge, clarifying tasks, establishing expectations, and developing technical familiarity. The second phase concerns situated interaction with the designed environment and the cognitive, affective, and excitative response states that may arise within it. The third phase comprises pedagogically supported opportunities to articulate, contextualize, critically appraise, consolidate, and transfer what was experienced. Crucially, these phases are not conceived as automatically completed stages or a fixed causal sequence; they identify analytically distinct yet interdependent parts of a learning design whose relationships vary with learners, tasks, content, facilitation, and context.

Technological features, in this framework, function as affordances rather than direct causes. Drawing on James Gibson’s ecological psychology, the model treats possibilities for action as arising in the relationship between an environment and an acting individual. Manipulating a virtual object may support procedural exploration when aligned with a learning goal, but it may be irrelevant or distracting when peripheral to the task. Multisensory information may aid orientation in one application while imposing unnecessary processing demands in another. Fidelity itself should not be equated with visual realism; a highly realistic representation may be unnecessary or even distracting when schematic information better supports the intended task, while detailed spatial representation may be essential when learners must distinguish subtle features or navigate complex environments.

During the situated phase, the model draws on the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model to describe three transient response states. Cognitive responses concern attention, interpretation, and mental effort; affective responses include interest, curiosity, enjoyment, discomfort, or frustration; excitative responses refer to physiological arousal. These states may fluctuate constantly during a VR activity because of distraction, task difficulty, technical disruption, cybersickness, or deliberate disengagement. Constructs frequently measured in VR studies, such as presence, agency, embodiment, and cognitive load, serve as indicators of selected aspects of this experience, but the model insists they are not interchangeable and not evidence of learning in themselves. A high presence score documents a subjective response; it does not demonstrate conceptual understanding, reflection, or transfer.

The framework also takes a cautious stance on one of VR’s most hyped applications: perspective-taking. Virtual environments can present situations from a particular visual position and invite learners to consider other people’s experiences, but occupying a first-person perspective or controlling an avatar does not reproduce another person’s cognitive standpoint, identity, or lived experience. Learners continue to interpret representations from their own social, cultural, and biographical positions. When simulations address marginalization, discrimination, homelessness, or migration, the model warns against equating perspective-taking with becoming another person, a critique that echoes longstanding concerns about so-called cybernetic tourism and the reduction of situated identities to temporarily consumable representations.

Reflection and transfer form the third instructional function, and the model argues they cannot be assumed to occur spontaneously. Learners may remove the headset with fragmented impressions, unresolved emotions, misconceptions, or unanswered questions. Post-VR reflection has distinctive objects: learners can examine not only the represented content but also how technological mediation shaped what they noticed, felt, or were able to do, and what the simulation omitted or whose perspective it privileged. Generative activities such as self-explanation, summarizing, and collaborative discussion can support integration, but the paper cites evidence that strategies effective in other contexts may yield no additional benefit in procedural VR learning and may even introduce competing demands. Preparation and reflection, in other words, are conditional design elements rather than universally effective additions.

The model’s implications for research are equally demanding. Studies should distinguish technological conditions, subjective response states, instructional processes, and learning outcomes, combining self-reports, behavioral and interaction data, physiological measures, and outcome assessments rather than relying on any single indicator. Longitudinal and process-oriented designs are prioritized because the educational meaning of a VR activity may emerge across time rather than during the virtual episode alone. For designers, the framework offers a sequence of questions rather than a prescription: identify a genuine educational or biographical need, compare VR against alternatives such as video, desktop simulation, or role-play, and select the technology only when its representational and interactive conditions contribute meaningfully to the task. Learning outcomes themselves are treated as multidimensional, spanning cognitive, affective, attitudinal, behavioral, and psychomotor domains, and as recursive: new understanding may generate fresh questions and needs, reconnecting the virtual episode with the learner’s continuing stream of experiences. In an era of accelerating VR adoption, the I-MEIL offers a sobering but constructive message: the headset is where the technology begins, not where the learning ends.

Subject of Research: A conceptual model of how virtual reality-supported immersive learning connects prior experience, preparation, situated engagement, reflection, and transfer

Article Title: An integrative model of virtual reality supported immersive learning within a biographical stream of experiences

Article References: Mulders, M. (2026). An integrative model of virtual reality supported immersive learning within a biographical stream of experiences. Discover Education, 5(1), Article 1070. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44217-026-02219-w

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44217-026-02219-w

Keywords: virtual reality, immersive learning, educational technology, instructional design, experiential learning, presence, embodiment, cognitive load, reflection, transfer of learning, Dewey, learner agency

Researchers at Marche Polytechnic University in Ancona, Italy, recruited 162 university students and immersed them in a virtual jewelry museum built in Unity, viewed through an HTC Vive Pro 2 head-mounted display. The setting was chosen deliberately. Italian museums frequently display small, fragile artefacts such as rings, pendants, brooches and coins behind sealed glass, objects visitors can see but never touch. A virtual jewelry museum is therefore an ecologically valid testbed for asking whether haptic feedback and embodied walking genuinely enrich exploration of artefacts that are otherwise off-limits.

Each participant explored the museum under four conditions in a within-subjects, counterbalanced design. In the baseline configuration, they navigated with a controller and manipulated objects with a controller. In the other three, the researchers swapped in SenseGlove Nova haptic gloves, which deliver up to 20 newtons of force feedback to four fingers by braking cables routed along the back of the hand, a KATWalk Mini-S omnidirectional treadmill that lets users walk in place on a low-friction surface held centered by a waist harness, or both devices simultaneously. Finger position was sampled at 60 hertz with sub-millimeter resolution, and every session began with a calibration and familiarization phase so results would reflect settled use rather than initial learning.

The team measured four pillars of user experience after each condition: presence, the sensation of genuinely being inside the virtual world, assessed with the Igroup Presence Questionnaire; usability, scored with the System Usability Scale; cognitive workload, captured repeatedly with the Instantaneous Self-Assessment scale; and cybersickness, tracked with the Fast Motion Sickness scale. Because every participant completed all four configurations, the data were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models that included a random intercept per participant and Bonferroni-corrected p-values across all twelve statistical tests.

The results dismantle the idea that advanced interfaces uniformly enhance the experience. Haptic gloves significantly reduced perceived usability, with a coefficient of minus 3.59 points on the usability scale compared with controllers, and significantly increased cognitive workload, with a coefficient of 0.23 and a medium effect size of Cohen’s d equal to 0.542, the most practically meaningful effect in the study. Treadmill locomotion, by contrast, significantly reduced cognitive workload, with a coefficient of minus 0.36, suggesting that once users adapt, body-based navigation relies on more automatic sensorimotor routines and frees mental resources compared with controller-mediated movement.

The most surprising finding concerned presence. Neither the gloves nor the treadmill shifted presence on its own, but their combination did, and in the wrong direction: participants wearing haptic gloves while walking on the treadmill reported significantly lower perceived presence than in any other configuration, with a significant interaction effect of beta minus 0.17. The researchers interpret this as a possible ‘coupling cost’: when both locomotion and manipulation are physically and attentively demanding at the same time, small inconsistencies in tracking, latency or action-feedback coupling become more salient, eroding the subjective sense of ‘being there’ even though neither device alone moves the needle.

Observations during testing supported the statistics. Participants needed only a brief adaptation to the treadmill before navigating with relative ease, consistent with the workload benefit. The gloves, however, occasionally misaligned tracked hand positions with actual movements, prompting users to consciously monitor and correct their gestures, while the physical bulk of the devices added discomfort and mental strain. Notably, cybersickness remained low across all conditions, with average Fast Motion Sickness scores between roughly 2 and 3 on a 0-to-20 scale, and neither device, alone or combined, significantly changed sickness levels, though the authors caution that a floor effect may have limited sensitivity here.

The practical implications for museum designers are concrete. Force-feedback gloves should not be treated as a default upgrade; they make sense mainly when tactile manipulation of small or fragile artefacts is the core of the experience, and only with adequate onboarding, calibration support and simplified interaction gestures. Treadmill locomotion can meaningfully ease the cognitive burden of navigation and suits installations where embodied exploration is central, but its space, cost, safety and accessibility demands make it more appropriate for supervised, high-end deployments than everyday museum floors. For novice visitors, controller-based interaction and navigation remain the most robust baseline, and locomotion and manipulation should be co-designed rather than bolted together independently.

The broader message reaches beyond cultural heritage. This study, published in Multimedia Tools and Applications, is among the first to systematically test the individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion within a single experimental protocol, showing that findings from studying devices in isolation do not automatically transfer to combined high-embodiment configurations. The relationship between immersion and experience quality appears non-linear: accurate hand tracking, fluid gesture execution and low interaction overhead may matter more to visitors than haptic realism itself. As museums and other industries weigh investments in ever-more-embodied VR, the evidence suggests the right question is not how much immersion can be added, but which trade-offs in usability, mental effort and comfort each addition actually buys.

Subject of Research: The individual and combined effects of haptic gloves and VR treadmill locomotion on presence, usability, cognitive workload and cybersickness in virtual museum experiences

Article Title: More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums

Article References: Agostinelli, T., Gambelli Fenili, E., & Mengoni, M. (2026). More immersion, better experience? The trade-offs of haptic gloves and treadmill locomotion in virtual museums. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 85(9), Article 754. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11042-026-21911-5

Keywords: virtual reality, haptic gloves, VR treadmill, virtual museums, presence, usability, cognitive workload, cybersickness, cultural heritage, user experience, immersive technology, locomotion

The six proposed Metrics for Sustainability offer a framework that moves beyond vague aspirations toward measurable performance. Material circularity captures the proportion of materials that remain in productive use across a lunar settlement, providing a quantitative analogue to recycling rates on Earth but extended to include the recovery of volatiles from waste streams and the repurposing of hardware at end of life. Life-support energy performance reflects the efficiency with which a habitat sustains breathable atmospheres, potable water, and thermal regulation, all of which demand continuous power through the two-week lunar night when solar generation is unavailable. Agricultural output measures the capacity of a settlement to produce food locally, which reduces launch mass from Earth, improves diet freshness for crews, and buffers against supply chain interruption.

Social cohesion as a metric may appear unusual in an engineering context, yet the evidence from isolated, confined, and extreme environments on Earth consistently shows that interpersonal dynamics, governance structures, and habitat design strongly influence mission outcomes. Research into salutogenesis in space emphasises that wellbeing is not merely the absence of illness but the presence of factors that help crews thrive, including a sense of coherence, meaningful work, and environments that support psychological adaptation. The finding that only a small minority of surveyed respondents expressed willingness to live in very small space settlements underscores that perceived habitability and community size matter to real people, and that any long-term lunar presence must be designed with human factors as rigorously as with power systems or landing pads.

Supply chain resilience, the fifth metric, acknowledges that even a mature lunar settlement will remain connected to Earth through the exchange of specialised components, scientific instruments, and personnel. Resilience in this context means the ability to absorb shocks, whether geopolitical conflict disrupts international partnerships, economic downturns curtail budgets, or a launch failure removes a critical logistics node. A settlement that can fabricate more of its own spares through additive manufacturing, maintain buffer stocks of essential consumables, and operate degraded systems safely for extended periods scores higher on this metric than one dependent on just-in-time delivery from Earth.

The final metric, legal and governance frameworks, is perhaps the most consequential and the least technologically deterministic. The Outer Space Treaty of 1967 established foundational principles, including that space is free for exploration and use by all states and that celestial bodies are not subject to national appropriation, but it was written long before the prospect of commercial lunar resource extraction became plausible. Subsequent instruments, national legislation, and multilateral initiatives have begun to address gaps, yet substantial ambiguity remains regarding property rights in extracted resources, standards of environmental protection on the lunar surface, coordination of activities to avoid harmful interference, and mechanisms for dispute resolution. The paper’s argument that the Spacefaring scenario is most desirable partly depends on the existence of agreed norms that allow multiple actors to operate without conflict.

The four scenarios, Red Tape, Run for Resources, Restricted Operations, and Spacefaring, function as a foresight tool that illuminates how different combinations of governance and technical choices lead to divergent futures. In a Run for Resources world, competitive dynamics could produce rapid activity but also duplication, environmental degradation of scientifically valuable sites, and increased risk of accident or confrontation. Restricted Operations, by contrast, might protect the lunar environment through excessive caution while foreclosing the benefits that a sustained presence could deliver, including scientific discovery, economic development, and the demonstration of technologies needed for eventual Mars missions. The Spacefaring scenario emerges as preferable because it couples ambitious activity with cooperative governance and sustainable practice, treating the Moon as a place where humanity learns to live and work off-planet responsibly.

The staged model of lunar presence, moving from robotic reconnaissance through short-termSortie missions to long-term habitation and eventually something akin to a lunar village, provides a useful temporal scaffold for planning sustainability interventions. At the robotic stage, sustainability considerations centre on planetary protection and the avoidance of contamination at sites of scientific interest, such as permanently shadowed regions where water ice records billions of years of solar system history. Short-term missions introduce questions of landing site selection, traffic management, and the cumulative effects of repeated landings on regolith dynamics and the exosphere. Long-term habitation raises the full suite of circular economy challenges, including waste processing, radiation shielding through regolith construction, and the provisioning of agriculture under artificial light.

The lunar night deserves particular emphasis because it dominates the engineering envelope of any permanent presence. Fourteen days of darkness mean that solar power alone cannot sustain life support without substantial storage or complementary generation, and options such as fuel cells, nuclear surface power, and strategically sited solar arrays at peaks of near-eternal light near the poles are all under active investigation. Any sustainability metric on energy performance must therefore account for night survivability, not just daytime efficiency, because a settlement that cannot reliably endure the night cannot claim long-term resilience. The paper’s pragmatic definition of permanence, as continuing operations by successive crews with continuous robotic support where technology cannot yet fully overcome the night, reflects this reality honestly.

In-situ resource utilisation sits at the heart of the technical vision. The lunar poles are believed to host water ice within permanently shadowed craters, a resource that can yield drinking water, breathable oxygen, and, through electrolysis, hydrogen and oxygen propellant. Regolith itself can be sintered or bound into building elements, providing radiation shielding and thermal mass without importing construction material. Oxygen constitutes a large fraction of regolith oxides, and extraction processes ranging from hydrogen reduction to molten regolith electrolysis are being developed at increasing levels of maturity. Extending ISRU toward ISRU-wellbeing, as the paper proposes, is a novel conceptual move: it suggests that local resources should support not only survival but flourishing, informing habitat architecture, lighting design that mimics terrestrial circadian cues, and communal spaces that foster the social cohesion the metrics seek to measure.

The proposal that the metrics could eventually be embedded in legal, governance, and technical agreements between stakeholders mirrors the way terrestrial environmental standards migrate from voluntary frameworks into binding regulation and procurement requirements. A common measurement language would allow agencies, commercial operators, and researchers to benchmark performance, compare approaches, and identify trade-offs transparently. It could also support proportionate regulation, since rules calibrated to measurable sustainability outcomes are less likely to be either ineffective or punitive than rules drafted in the abstract. The recommended research agenda, which prioritises refining the metrics and soliciting feedback from diverse stakeholder groups, recognises that legitimacy depends on participation, and that frameworks imposed without broad consultation are unlikely to endure.

Connections across the three space domains reinforce the argument that lunar sustainability cannot be pursued in isolation. Launch activity on Earth generates emissions and affects communities near spaceports, so reducing launch mass through ISRU indirectly reduces terrestrial impacts. Orbital infrastructure, including stations that act as gateways for lunar missions, must itself be operated sustainably amid growing congestion and debris in Earth orbit, since a collision or debris-generating event could interrupt the logistics chain on which lunar operations depend. Conversely, technologies matured for the Moon, such as closed-loop life support, advanced recycling, and autonomous construction, have clear applications in orbital habitats and eventually in Mars missions, making lunar sustainability a proving ground for broader spacefaring capability.

Historical context strengthens the case for proactive rather than reactive governance. On Earth, many environmental harms were addressed only after damage became evident and costly, whereas the Planetary Boundaries framework exemplifies an attempt to define safe operating limits in advance. The Moon offers a rare opportunity to apply that lesson preemptively, before large-scale activity begins, because key decisions about landing sites, resource extraction methods, and heritage protection for sites like the Apollo landing areas are still being made. Whether future generations will judge humanity’s return to the Moon as sustainable will depend substantially on choices made in the present decade, and the framework of a Lunar Circular Economy with measurable metrics provides a concrete starting point for making those choices deliberately rather than by default.

Subject of Research: Developing a sustainable human lunar presence using space resources

Article Title: Developing a sustainable human lunar presence using space resources

Article References: Cernev, T., de Zwart, M., & Hessel, V. (2026). Developing a sustainable human lunar presence using space resources. Space and Planetary Resources, 2(1), Article 8. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44461-026-00014-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44461-026-00014-x

Keywords: Developing, sustainable, human, lunar, presence, space, resources, scientific research